Violence and Democracy. By John Keane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 226 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-83699-9), $23.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-54544-7). John Keane is a well known political theorist and public intellectual, whose work largely falls at or beyond the outer margins of international studies. His longstanding interest in violence, however, has more than once carried him quite deeply into the international domain (Keane 1996, 1998). Violence and Democracy , in which Keane attacks the complacency generated by democratic peace theory and the “zone of peace–zone of conflict” view of the world, is a contribution to these debates within international studies. Keane's starting point is the profound contradiction between the necessarily civil foundations and structures of democracy, on the one hand, and violent practices of all kinds, on the other. By violence he means physical violence. Indeed, he rules out structural violence (Ch. 2) and thus any discussion of the effects of the neoliberal international economic order. His main targets are those theoretical views that seem to make violence an inevitable feature of political life by rooting it in human nature or cultural stereotyping (Ch. 5). He objects to these both because he thinks they are wrong, and because of the way they are used politically within democracies to legitimate violent countermeasures that are corrosive to democracy. Keane is not a pacifist, and he acknowledges that democracies must sometimes use force to defend their civil sphere against the “fetishists of violence.” His …